Welcome

LuaTeX is an extended version of pdfTeX
using Lua as an embedded scripting language. The
LuaTeX project's main
objective is to provide an open and configurable variant of TeX while at the same
time offering downward compatibility. From the user perspective we have pdfTeX as
stable and more or less frozen 8 bit engine, XeTeX as unicode input and font
aware engine using libraries for font handling, and LuaTeX as engine that is
programmable and delegates as much as possible to Lua, with the objective to keep
the core engine lean and mean. Each engine has its benefits and drawbacks (more details here).

At the TUG 2007 conference in San Diego, the
first public beta of LuaTeX was presented. Most of that day was dedicated to the
project, its outcomes and its objectives (this project is partly driven by the
oriental TeX project). Although intermediate version could be used for production
the first stable release happened at the 10th ConTeXt meeting in 2016 in the
Netherlands.

There are three closely related projects (see download for svn details):

The first two projects result in a collection of OpenType fonts that can be
used in LuaTeX and XeTeX. The third project results in a MetaPost library (to be
used in LuaTeX) and a version of MetaPost (written in C) that can handle larger
quantities and fulfills some long standing wishes of the MetaPost development
team.

All these projects report on a regular basis in (local) TeX usergroup journals
and at TeX related conferences. Normally the most recent information can be
acquired in the ConTeXt universe: mailing lists, source code, status documents
and manuals.

On TeXlive 2016 you can find the stable release 0.90. In September 2016 we
released version 1.00 which will be on TeXlive 2017. You can fetch the latest
binaries for quite some platforms from The ConTeXt Garden or
compile them from source yourself.